Antiboyscout wrote:1st
Thorough Taxation the surplus value is redistributed. It may even be redistributed to people worse off than than those working for the company. Also you are conflating socialism and communism again. STATE control of the means of production. Also, got to love those communist tag lines "exploits their workers". Let me guess, you believe in the labor theory of value too.
It would require something like 100% taxation, that is the seizing of all profits, to even entertain the idea that surplus value is being redistributed back to the people who created it. And going back to your original point, none of the states that are currently undergoing austerity have such a system in place, and so it is incorrect to say that austerity is a consequence of "late stage socialism". Additionally, even if you wish to use state control of the means of production as your litmus test for socialism, it's still lacking in the example of states undergoing policies of austerity, since owners and bosses still ultimately control their businesses. There's no vote in parliament that clothing firm X must produce styles Y in quantity Z.
Antiboyscout wrote:2nd
Of course I'm making an appeal to nature, HUMAN nature. That is what psychology is based on. Here is another difference between communism and capitalism. Communism is an Ideology that determines what people SHOULD be doing. Capitalism is a Social Science that tries to explain How and Why people ARE doing what they do. And as for "capitalist" competition, most of early human existence was subsistence level lacking extra production available to trade. Complex nearly global international trade systems existed at least as early as the Bronze age.
You haven't actually made any point refuting the main thesis of my critique of your appeal to nature. I can literally just copy/paste the paragraph and replace "natural behavior" with "human nature". Like so:
What you're engaging in is a form of the appeal to nature. We can look to human nature and find myriad behaviors that we in human society would not tolerate. Murder, for one. Should we allow murder because it is human nature? What about rape? Or cannibalism? As human beings with sentience and an innate moral sense, we are more than capable of turning away from human nature that we find to be morally repugnant. Capitalist competition has proven itself time and time again to lead to unacceptably immoral outcomes. We are not obligated to forever engage in it simply because it's "human nature".
Murder, rape, cannibalism, et al. are a part of human nature since human beings have been engaging in them for tens of thousands of years. And yet, we in modern societies do our best to prevent these things. If they are natural, why? Surely, since it's apparently wrong to determine what people SHOULD be doing, then why shouldn't everyone be allowed to do literally anything, even if those things are at the expense of other people's lives?
Empathy is also an aspect of human nature. It allows us to understand that certain other aspects of human nature are damaging and bad, and they should not be cultivated or even tolerated. It is this aspect of human nature from which morality springs. And ultimately, for the same reason that things like murder are not tolerated despite being human, so too it is inescapable that capitalist competition not be tolerated.